The Cribs - "For All My Sisters"

For All My Sisters, the sixth album from The Cribs, represents a beginning of sorts for Wakefield’s finest sons. It’s their first album since releasing the career spanning ‘best of’ comp Payola in 2013, and their first since leaving the relatively cosy confines of indie label Wichita.

Just look at the cover. A fresh start. The last time we saw the three Jarman brothers together on the front of a Cribs record was a whole decade ago, acting out under the banner of The New Fellas. In retrospect, it was probably that album (‘Martell’ in particular) which saw them unfairly lumped in with all those awful mid-2000s landfill indie bands. The Cribs were always better than that, fusing a hardcore ethic with serious songwriting chops, the punk and pop aspects of their dichotomy becoming increasingly evident with each release.

Now, all the signs seem to point towards a second act for one of Britain’s most underrated bands. They might not even be saddled with that tiresome tagline for much longer – For All My Sisters is billed as their ‘pop’ album, an ambition seemingly in line with their new major label status. To this end, Cars frontman Ric Ocasek was enlisted as producer, and his influence can be felt all over the record, from the Weezer-cribbing ‘An Ivory Hand’ to the shimmering guitars of ‘Summer of Chances’. Really though, Ocasek’s changes aren’t all that drastic. For all the sparkle and polish he brings, there’s still rawness here. Sometimes these sides collide to great effect, as the sludgy basement chorus of ‘Mr. Wrong’ is brightened up with fairground synths.

Lyrically it’s still firmly a Cribs album, concerned with love, loss and introspection. The band has spoken about wanting to make something “unabashed, without all that baggage and self-critique”. Indeed, the main way that it scans as a ‘pop’ album is in its confidence and enthusiasm, and a willingness to fully commit to ideas. Well, that, and a handful of absolute top-drawer singles. ‘Different Angle’ is classic Cribs, with an insistent riff that sounds like a throwback to their Johnny Marr era. The chorus promises greatness but falls just short through repetition. ‘Burning for No One’ is more of a departure, a taut, danceable song with spiky new-wave guitars and the emotional honesty that we’ve come to expect from the band.

It’s not just the singles that do the heavy lifting – ‘Finally Free’ is a theatrical opener that Gary wrote in hospital, desperate to get out in time to meet a recording date. ‘Summer of Chances’ has the album’s best chorus, with Ryan pushing his vocal range more than ever before, and glossy production reminiscent of Ocasek’s work with Guided By Voices.

As with the previous album, the main problem is the filler material. ‘Pacific Time’ is the only real misstep, dialling down the tempo and aiming to build gradually but not doing anything interesting with it. The largely acoustic ‘Simple Story’ falls after an amazing opening run and almost kills the momentum stone dead. It’s pretty good in its own right though, with a palpable sadness and desperation communicated through distant drum thuds and weird spaghetti western synths. It speaks volumes to the album’s strength that this is one of its weakest songs.

Closing track ‘Pink Snow’ eradicates any remaining notions of For All My Sisters as a pop album. It’s a slow burning seven-minute monolith in the vein of ‘City of Bugs’, and possibly the finest song this band has ever released. Apparently some early versions stretched to fifteen minutes, but this recording is perfectly structured. It opens with delicate guitar figures before shifting to full-on Sonic Youth noise assault. Ryan’s lyrics, which also give us the album’s title, are about bravery and connection, and the importance of the female relationships in his life. It’s honestly a real joy to hear the band reaching like this and succeeding so absolutely.

A bunch of the songs here should quickly cement themselves as setlist staples. For a band on their sixth album, that’s usually more than can be reasonably expected. But For All My Sisters is a real achievement, one that easily stands with their best work. Cribs Mk. II are off to a flying start.

Highlights: Burning for No One; An Ivory Hand; Summer of Chances; Pink Snow

Pearson Sound - "Pearson Sound"

David Kennedy has been around for some time now. Since first emerging as Ramadanman in 2006, he’s co-founded the meticulously curated Hessle Audio label along with Ben UFO and Pangaea, and built a reputation as one of the best DJs on the circuit. The last few years have seen him releasing a series of club-ready EPs under the Pearson Sound banner, which brings us to his self-titled debut album, almost ten years into his career. Pearson Sound fits into Kennedy’s usual percussion-heavy manner, but otherwise is difficult to pigeonhole in terms of genre. It’s difficult to tell where these tracks are destined for, but overall it feels like a self-conscious move towards more of a home-listening environment.

Kennedy has spoken about wanting to keep things concise, but even with shorter track lengths, many of these pieces fail to remain interesting throughout their duration. The album’s main failing is really a lack of momentum or any urgency. ‘Russet’ is the worst offender, an anonymous track with little to recommend itself. Even Kennedy’s immense talent for rhythmic invention seems worryingly absent. This isn’t the case elsewhere – see the jackhammer drums of ‘Asphalt Sparkle’ that sound like splitting open a vat of ball bearings – but for an album that relies so heavily on percussion, there’s not a whole lot of interest going on. It rarely feels like top drawer Pearson Sound.

In terms of pure sound design, the album is more of a success. We get tracks like ‘Glass Eye’, with its deep bass pulses surrounded by spitting percussion, and later on a section that sounds like monastic chanting. ‘Gristle’ begins with coarse, rasping textures, and wouldn’t sound out of place soundtracking a John Carpenter movie. Ultimately though, there’s no real direction to either of these pieces, and this sense of missed opportunities is a recurring theme throughout the album.

Thankfully, there is a clutch of redeeming gems to be found here, and on the whole it’s the more up-tempo tracks that fare the best. ‘Swill’ provides the album’s first genuine shock, much needed after a tepid opening run. It’s restless, constantly shifting, never content to rest on one idea for too long. It opens aggressively, with clanging junkyard drums, before pulling back for a while and then lurching into the thicket again. ‘Rubber Tree’ is a very welcome closer, harnessing and directing the energy levels of ‘Swill’ and turning it into something resembling Four Tet’s club focused Pyramid album.

Both of these tracks manage to wring some melody out of the percussion battery, but nothing on the level of, say, the Starburst EP. ‘Headless’ is the exception to this. Coming at the end of a dense, humid mid-section, its main motif – a startling processed vocal in the vein of Holly Herndon or Oneohtrix Point Never – has a really visceral impact that’s largely absent from the rest of the album, and has you wishing for more.

Taken together, these three tracks show much more purpose and invention than any of the other offerings, and make this album a worthwhile listen. Ultimately though, there’s too few ideas on show to sustain a full LP, and most of those which do engage are leant on too heavily. A minor disappointment.



Highlights: Swill; Headless; Rubber Tree

Angel Olsen - "Burn Your Fire for No Witness"

Coming two years after the wonderful Half Way Home, the buzz in the lead-up to Burn Your Fire for No Witness was that Olsen had traded out gentle acoustic songs for guitar-driven rockers. Those paying attention between albums might have heard the standalone ‘Sweet Dreams’ as the first sign that Olsen would be changing her palette. Up-tempo lead single ‘Forgiven/Forgotten’ seemed to confirm this theory, feeling more suited to festival stages than campfire confessionals.

As it turns out, those folk purists pre-emptively shouting “Judas!” needn’t have worried about Olsen’s new direction. Electric guitar is certainly an important part of the album, adding dirty Southern fuzz to ‘Hi-Five’ and driving the chorus of ‘Forgiven/Forgotten’, but it’s used sparingly, with the latter song an outlier on a slow album that overall doesn’t feel too far removed from the delicate spirit of Half Way Home. The differences though, while subtle, are enough to cause a few problems.

The two albums follow a similar pattern – eleven songs, with two longer ones. While Half Way Home was slightly undone by its longer tracks, with the meandering ‘Safe in the Womb’ diverting the flow of the album’s first half, Burn Your Fire avoids this problem – the seven-minute ‘White Fire’ beguils with its warm, hypnotic texture, while 'Enemy' stands as one of her best lyrical displays.

The main problem with Burn Your Fire is that it moves too far away from the intimate vibe of Half Way Home without offering much in the way of replacement. This isn’t always the case – the new set of textures is partly responsible for two of the best songs on the album, both of which start out as slow torch songs before being lifted into something much grander. 'Dance Slow Decades' begins with a particularly vulnerable passage bringing to mind the early-‘90s slowcore outfit Codeine, before morphing into something resembling Mazzy Star’s more country moments. 'Windows' is a brilliant album closer, with Olsen providing her own angelic backing vocals over a blossoming piano-led outro.

However, more often than not, the production dulls the atmosphere rather than accentuating it, and it’s rarely interesting enough in itself to warrant the increased fidelity. The instrumentation can feel sort of anonymous, whereas on Half Way Home it was right up there in the mix, almost uncomfortably, making it impossible not to imagine those songs being played by someone. Were it not for Olsen’s singing, which remains wonderfully dynamic and unpredictable, tracks like ‘High & Wild’ (the start of a mid-album lull) might feel drained of personality. As it is, all the heavy lifting is laid on her voice, which even then sometimes lacks that arresting quality of otherness that made Half Way Home such a unique document.

To add to that, Olsen’s writing talent, while remaining strong, has lost some of its quirks. Nothing here has the unexpected turns of, say, ‘Acrobat’, and there seems to be less variation in her melodies. Perhaps it’s just that she’s no longer a new artist, but the surprise of her early material is largely absent. Occasionally, as on 'White Fire', it gives way to songs that reveal their quality over repeated listens, but half the time that’s not the case. Burn Your Fire is hardly a bad album, as there are plenty of good songs, but it’s a disappointing entry in what to date had been a pretty flawless catalogue. There's nothing as good as her previous highlights, and the album as a whole doesn’t gel particularly well. By all accounts Olsen's live show has stepped up a notch, and neither her voice nor her song-writing ability is under question here, but next time round it might be interesting to see her push them some more.

Highlights: ‘Forgiven/Forgotten’; ‘White Fire’; ‘Dance Slow Decades’; ‘Windows’

Young Thug & Bloody Jay - "Black Portland"

Young Thug is blessed with one of the weirdest voices in contemporary rap – a kind of manic yelp that perfectly fits his tightly-wound flow, careening between staccato assault and drunken lurch. You’ll be marvelling over it for a while before you actually start paying attention to his stream-of-consciousness lyrics. Having slowly infiltrated hip-hop conversations last year with his excellent mixtape 1017 Thug, he teams up with Atlanta rapper Bloody Jay for Black Portland, an 11-track effort which, in its relative concision and collection of great beats, actually comes out on top as Young Thug’s best project yet.

Looked at from the right angle, this could be quite a conventional tape – there are some genuinely memorable hooks/choruses, and the beats, if tinged with that distinctive Atlanta weirdness, are satisfyingly high-octane and ready for the club. It’s to these two rappers credit then that Black Portland never really feels like a normal affair – their aesthetic is just too damn weird, throwing in demented ad-libs all over the place and interrupting each other’s lines.

It’s mastered better than 1017 Thug, but the fidelity is still slightly off, to the point where Thug’s voice at its most intense can actually be quite grating, especially on headphones. Whether this proves to be annoying or part of the appeal will depend on the listener. Thug and Jay’s voices are pretty interchangeable for the most part (Jay’s is lower but just as urgent), and that’s fine, it’s more like a personality overload than a clash of heads. I must emphasise that this tape is fun over pretty much everything else. It’s almost impossible not to imagine these guys having a blast in the recording booth while listening to Black Portland, and thankfully its brevity means that this isn’t one of those 20+ track efforts that run out of energy halfway through.

Anyone who’s been paying attention to Atlanta rap recently will most likely know the hit ‘Danny Glover’, a song that bears a striking resemblance to A$AP Ferg’s ‘Work’ and has had both Drake and Kanye singing Young Thug’s praises. The real keeper here though is the melodic ‘4 Eva Bloody’, which goes in straight out of the gate with its indelible chorus and a yo-yoing beat that sounds like an old Sonic the Hedgehog game.

There are two more chilled-out tracks here – ‘Florida Water’ is the major changeup, with its woozy, almost tropical vibe (it sounds surprisingly like Vic Mensa’s ‘Tweakin’), and later on Future turns up for ‘Nothing But Some Pain’ with one of his trademark hooks. Honestly, there are no bad tracks here, and loads of great ones. It’s that rare hip-hop mixtape where you’re not just combing the tracklist for keepers, everything earns its place.

Bloody Jay explained the name of the tape to the FADER – on one level it’s a funny stoner pun on Portland’s basketball team (the ‘Trail Blazers’), but more interestingly, he conceives of ‘Black Portland’ as an imaginary place, a state of mind for creative artists who aren’t afraid to break outside of regional contexts (Portland has one of the lowest black populations in America and, unlike Atlanta, isn't really know for its hip-hop scene...) Sure this tape conforms to the ‘Atlanta sound’ to an extent, but it always feels like a springboard for the two rappers rather than a net.

We learnt recently that Young Thug has done a couple of songs with Kanye, so hopefully we’ll see those in the future (damn, Thug would sound great on a Yeezus sequel). In the meantime we can look forward to confirmed projects with Rich Homie Quan and Chief Keef, and keep on bumping Black Portland. Grab it here.


Highlights: 'Signs'; '4 Eva Bloody'; 'Danny Glover'

Pixies - "EP-2"

Anyone complaining about the Pixies ruining their legacy with new releases is being too precious. As a test, I listened to Doolittle this morning to see if it had been tarnished and – hey, guess what? – it still sounded as good as ever. It's a separate era, and Pixies in 2014 are a different beast, especially now that Kim Deal is out of the band. I don’t think anyone honestly expected them to be writing material on a par with their classics, but still, people coming to EP-2 with any expectations will likely be disappointed.

Last year’s EP-1 was far from excellent, especially for a band of the Pixies’ stature, but it had a couple of interesting detours – veering into glistening dream-pop on 'Andro Queen' and shaking up the structure of 'Indie Cindy'. The classic Pixies quiet/loud dynamic seemed to have been replaced by a textural one – sparse/lush – and the relatively glossy production suited the more gentle songs. The best bits were the ones that didn’t really sound like the Pixies at all, but could easily stand on their own.

In comparison to EP-1, some of the more familiar elements of the Pixies sound are back in evidence on EP-2 – Frank Black’s howl, Joey Santiago’s guitar texture – but this does nothing to disguise how rubbish the songs themselves are. In all honesty, it just reminds us how poorly this new material compares to the older stuff. 'Magdalena' is probably the best thing here, sounding as it does like a Bossanova offcut with its floaty chorus, but it’s distinctly unmemorable.

Of the four tracks, 'Blue Eyed Hexe' has been given the video treatment and seems to be clocking up the most radio plays, but it plods along at an interminable speed, and is ruined by stadium-ready drums and the same annoying guitar chug as the verses in 'Magdalena'. Any sense of threat built up in the verses is immediately dispelled by the awful chorus. 'Snakes' is even worse, with the lyrics being the main offender here.

'Greens and Blues' is apparently the band’s attempt to write a new set-closer to replace 'Gigantic'. Not that you’d be able to tell from listening. It's not too bad, but the chorus never takes off the way it should do, and the old dynamic shifts that used to seem so natural are sorely missed here. Some of the riffs and little guitar measures hark back to classic Pixies, though that temporary spark of recognition never ignites into anything remotely convincing, pastiche or otherwise.

Maybe if EP-2 had been offered as a free download, then I could have approached it without any expectations. As a paid-for release, it’s incredibly disappointing, and I doubt many Pixies fans will be eagerly awaiting the third and final instalment in the EP series. 

Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - "Wig Out at Jagbags"

Wig Out at Jagbags is Stephen Malkmus’ sixth album with the Jicks – an impressive tally for this elder statesman of indie rock, and one more than he ever managed with his former band Pavement. Like previous album Mirror Traffic, Jagbags finds plenty of time for noodly guitar passages, but it’s not quite so self-consciously jammy as some of the more indulgent Jicks albums. This middle ground suits middle-aged Malkmus well – it allows his music to stretch out and breathe more than it was ever allowed to in Pavement, but the shorter song structures mean that the spotlight is never away from his words for too long.

Talking of lyrics, Malkmus is on pretty good form here. Other than the album title, there’s not much in the way of wacky wordplay – this is either a blessing or a bummer, depending on how much you like Brighten the Corners. Instead, we get a bunch of wry, vague musings on aging and comfortable living. Lyrically and musically though, Malkmus’ tongue is still firmly in his cheek, opening the slapstick punk of ‘Rumble at the Rainbo’ with a shout of “This one’s for you, Grandad!” before breaking down into a cod-reggae ending. The song’s main refrain of “Come here tonight and you’ll see, no-one has changed and no-one ever will,” is most likely an ironic joke at his own settling-down, but as always with Malkmus we can never quite tell.

As with so much of Pavement’s finest work, Jagbags is an album with a relaxed, autumnal feel. Its freewheeling nature means that even the faster songs only rarely feel in danger of falling off their axis. This is not necessarily a bad thing – after all, rollercoasters are still exciting even when we know the path set out for them. Solid guitar playing and frequent tempo shifts, like the false start at the beginning of ‘Houston Hades’, make up for some of the more dead-end meandering, and the production is impressive throughout, especially the brass section on ‘Chartjunk’ and ‘J Smoov’. The latter – a delicate ballad that builds to a subtle climax – is an easy highlight, and one of the best songs that Malkmus has written since latter-day Pavement, calling to mind the gentle lilt of ‘Major Leagues’.

Jagbags easily ranks in the upper tier of Jicks albums, possibly second only to the debut, which housed some of Malkmus’ most laser-focused songwriting. Despite the impressive production, it could do to be a bit more varied tonally, but rarely for a Jicks album, you won’t find yourself wanting to skip ahead. There are very few weak tracks, and the highlights are sensibly spread throughout, resulting in one of his most immediately satisfying albums in years. A wonderful beginning to to the year.


Highlights: ‘Lariat’; ‘J Smoov’; ‘Rumble at the Rainbo’